I've grown up skiing my whole life. Ever since I was 5 years old, our family vacation every year has been a ski trip.
Both of my parents are avid skiers, so they wanted my sister and I to pick it up from an early age to make it a family tradition. Living in New England, we'd pack up the car and head to Okemo, Waterville Valley, Sunday River, or Mount Sunapee. Whichever weeks we had off from school we'd spend skiing, regardless of the weather. Sometimes that meant cutting arm and head holes out of trash bags for waterproofing in the rain, or bundling up to stay warm in the negative temperatures with wind chill but we'd make it work.
Growing up in the northeast, we got accustomed to skiing on what we lovingly referred to as packed powder, a generous term for ice. One year, some friends of ours won a weekend at a condo in Colorado at a charity auction and invited us up to visit and ski. Once we got a taste for skiing on actual snow there was no going back, we shifted our family trips from New Hampshire and Vermont to Colorado and Utah.
Since then, I've had the pleasure of skiing all across the US and even in the Swiss alps. Whether it's with family, friends, fraternity brothers for a winter formal, or co-workers on a company trip, I'll take any opportunity I can get to hit the slopes and make some memories. Here are just a few highlights from my various ski trips over the years.
Video Montages
A few years back I got a GoPro and started using it to recording our ski trips. I quickly learned that you need to keep the video running all day for you to catch the highlights, especially if you're looking to snag a wipeout. Because of that, I'd end up with hours of video footage at the end the week, and although I had some awesome clips, the videos were just too long that I wasn't going back and re-watching them like I'd hoped. So, I decided to start messing around with GoPro's video editing software Quik to create highlight reels. This way I could condense a whole day down to a 60 second clip of highlights, layer on some cool background music, and make something that was fun to watch over and over again.
Below are some of those highlight reels from a trip I took with my friend Andrew to Aspen Snowmass. I'm in the red & black jacket while Andrew is in the grey & green. Most of the clips focus on us actually skiing; however, I experimented with layering in some artistic shots of the scenery, chairlifts, and overall skiing experience. I also threw in some stats my GoPro recorded like speed, altitude, g's, etc. to add to the thrill. Hope you enjoy!
Bloopers
And of course, no video montage would be complete without a blooper reel! Remember that awesome cover photo of me soaring through the air at the top of the page? Well, here's some behind the scenes footage showing I nailed the launch, but didn't quite stick the landing... Thankfully my cameraman was on point to catch the action shot, and my GoPro was running to give us a good laugh later.
It's hard to tell in the video but after I was ejected from both skis, one of them decided to keep going the rest of the way down the hill. It made for a good workout running down the mountain in knee deep snow carrying the other ski, but it was totally worth it. That wasn't our only wipeout of the trip, not by a long shot. Here's a compilation of some of our funnier falls for your viewing entertainment (no one was harmed in the filming of this video).
So, if you're looking for someone to ski with or a videographer to make a compilation video, be sure to hit me up!